"there are immaturities, but there are immensities"- from Bright Star (dir. Jane Campion)^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
"the fear of being wrong can keep you from being anything at all" - Nayland Blake

Wednesday, December 17, 2014

The Jesus And Mary Chain

The Observer, 1988

by Simon Reynolds

In their promo videos the Jesus and Mary Chain aim to be as
disorientating to the eye as they are to the ear. Look again at their videos
(now available on a WEA compilation, The Jesus and Mary Chain), and
you can follow their attempts to find a visual equivalent to the feedback in
their music. Their favourite effects are out-of-focus or an aberrant sense of
colour. 'Just Like Honey' has the band in the distance with a flower in the
foreground, so close to the lens it's a dazzling dyslexic blur. 'Kill Surf
City' is like watching a severely distressed colour TV.

More interesting than these sometimes hackneyed attempts at psychedelia
is the way The Jesus and Mary Chain carry themselves in front of the camera:
they come over as listless and neurasthenic. Dressed head to foot in black,
with complexions as bloodless as veal, the only vivid thing about them is their
spots. Their eyes refuse to meet the camera. The Jesus and Mary Chain's
passivity and introversion are in stark contrast to the pop video norm of
vivacity and vigour.

It's totally appropriate for their songs, which more often than
not are about being immobilised by rapture or melancholy. That said, their
enervated demeanour probably has a more prosaic cause: Jim and William Reid
(the creative core of the Mary Chain) find making videos tedious and
aggravating. "Making a video is a disgustin' thing to have to do,"
says Jim. "You stand there in front of a team of strangers and move your
mouth to a tape of your record, and you think, ‘This isn't what we started
making music for’. The only way for us to deal with video with any dignity is
to refuse to make any effort."

It has been said that The Jesus and Mary Chain are remarkable
for making unhealthiness sexy and glamorous in a decade in which sex-in-pop has
become an aerobic and therapeutic business. "The TV version of sex
repulses me," says Jim. "It's nothing to do with what I find sexy. I
think the idea of people with perfect complexions and perfect bodies and
perfect clothes is disgusting."

Perfection may not be what they look for, or expect, in real
life, but The Jesus and Mary Chain's music does seem to be the result of a
quest for 'perfect pop'. Like Morrissey of The Smiths, they spent their
adolescence immersed in music, developing fierce convictions and fantasising
about making a kind of ultimate pop that drew on everything they liked. The
Jesus and Mary Chain's sound isn't revivalist so much as a 'never-never pop'
where the Velvet Underground meets The Stooges meets Spector meets the Stones
meets Brian Wilson. Their songs trigger your acquired reflexes by dint of the
resonance of their time-honoured chord changes. The Jesus and Mary Chain are a
post-modern group: everything is in quotation marks. They are hooked on the
epic form of classic rock; not the emotional content so much as the way that
content is structured and aggrandised. This is pop about pop, as opposed to an
urgent communication delivered straight from the heart.

"The songs aren't stories, they're not like a diary. I
don't really have a clue what our songs are about," says William.
"They're usually words thrown together to fit a line or a tune. But that
doesn't mean the end result is meaningless. Sometimes the way your mind works
is too complex to follow. Like with ‘Some Candy Talking’, it's obvious to us
now that it was a drug song and all the people who criticised
us at the time were right. But at the time we were adamant that it wasn't about
that at all."

The Reid brothers formed The Jesus and Mary Chain after spending
five years on the dole in their home town of East Kilbride. "I tried the
alternative, which was working in a factory," says Jim. "It was the
worst year of my life. I spent a whole year doing nothing, but I had to look as
though I was doing something. So after a year I went back on the dole. I
enjoyed the idea of not taking part in the whole factory thing. I was getting a
half a bag of peanuts for doing nothing, my friends were getting a whole bag of
peanuts for working. I thought I had the better deal. I got more dental work
done in that period than I've had since, 'cos it was for nothing."

During the five fallow years on the dole, they dreamed their
dreams of perfect pop and "talked about forming a group for years".
When they finally did in 1984, it was because their father had been made
redundant and three males hanging around the house led to a strained
atmosphere. Are they dramatically happier now their dreams have come true?
"Not at all, that's the weird thing," says Jim. "What we're
doing now was our fantasy when we lived in East Kilbride. But that was because
then I didn't realise that what I had then was as good as what I have now.
Although I had less materially, at least then there were real dreams, something
to look forward to. Now I don't have any dreams: we've achieved what we're
going to and, if we're lucky, we'll maintain it at the same level. There isn't
a dream anymore. Or rather, the dream is less realistic now: to take what we do
to millions and millions of people, to U2 scale. Now we're in the business, we
can see how unrealistic the dream is...

"The whole happiness thing doesn't last. It's like a drug.
You're in new circumstances and you're ecstatically happy, but then that
becomes normality. What I think is that happy people are happy, whatever
situation they're in. And if you're not like that, anything else is just
short-term, you get used to it, you return to your normal level of
despondency."

"When we started this business, we were chasing some sort
of myth — the T Rex, Rolling Stones star trip," says William. "When
you get behind the door, it kinda numbs you towards it." Jim adds: "I
don't like meeting people whose records I've always liked... it can ruin the
record for me if they turn out to be a hateful person. That has happened a
couple of times — I won't name names. But when it does, you just don't play the
records any more."

For a band that works within rock romanticism and its language
of obsession and impulse, The Jesus and Mary Chain are curiously detached. They
don't like a record's perfection to be contaminated by the fallibility of the
person who made it, or by the vagaries of live performance. Rock's
fantasy adolescence stood in for any real adolescence they might have had and
they don't want to be disabused of the dreams acquired then. Their music is a
kind of distillation of dreams, a 'perfect pop' woven from strands from all
those past moments of perfection the Reid brothers like to keep pristine.

The Jesus and Mary Chain

Observer, 29 March 1992

by Simon Reynolds

For a while it looked
like The Jesus and Mary Chain had slipped into the ‘where are they now? file.
"We’re lazy bastards," says William Reid, explaining the
two-and-a-half-year gap between their new album,Honey’s Dead,and its predecessor,Automatic. "But in a way ,
it’s lazier to knock an LP out every year like some bands do," adds his
brother Jim. "We take our time because we want every track on our albums
to be a single."

Besides, staying out
of the public eye was probably a shrewd move. From late 1989 to early 1991, The
Mary Chain and their noise-pop ilk were eclipsed by the Manchester indie-dance
crossover bands like Stone Roses. Jim Reid agrees: "I think that if we’d
brought out this record a year ago there wouldn’t have been as much interest as
there is now."

While many of their
erstwhile kindred spirits were converted to rave culture (most notably Primal
Scream, whose frontman Bobby Gillespie once drummed for The Mary Chain), the
Reid brothers kept their distance from house music’s matey euphoria.
"We’re too sure of what we’re about to be affected by fashion," says
Jim. "And there’s a lot about the rave scene I don’t like – the return of
hippie ideas, the phoney positivity. Humans aren’t going to evolve into a
higher life form in three years, just because everyone’s swallowed a ton of
Ecstasy."

Nonetheless, rap and
house have had a subliminal influence on The Mary Chain. Their new material is
still thick with their trade mark, heavily-distorted guitar, but it is more
groove-orientated. The recent Top Ten single, ‘Reverence’, doused a churning
hip-hop beat with caustic Stooges fuzz guitar.

"You can’t ignore
what’s happened in the last few years," explains Jim. "We realise
that we’ve always lacked a decent rhythm section." But then, part of the
stylised charm of The Mary Chain’s classic 1985 debut ‘Psychocandy’ was the
rudimentary nature of its backbeat. "Rhythm never mattered to us before.
Now we want our records to sound stronger."

Since ‘Madchester’
blew over, the British rock climate has changed in the Reid Bros’ favour. Last
year was dominated by an upsurge of noisepop bands influenced by The Mary
Chain, whether directly or indirectly (via the brilliantly innovative My Bloody
Valentine, who began as J&MC copyists).

The Mary Chain’s
current ‘Rollercoaster’ tour (whose bill includes My Bloody Valentine, Dinosaur
Jr and Blur), highlights their elder statesman role. "The idea of our band
was always meant to alert people to the fact that you didn’t need to be a
guitar virtuoso to make great music. Imagination is more important than
expertise. The fact that when we made ‘Psychocandy’ we’d barely been playing
guitar for weeks, inspired a lot of people to form their own bands."

‘Rollercoaster’ has
been widely compared to 1991’s Lollapalooza tour; where seven top alternative
groups crisscrossed the US to reach an audience of half a million. But while
Lollapalooza had vague counter-cultural pretensions, the Reid Bros see
‘Rollercoaster’ as return to "the package tour of the punk era, when The
Clash, Buzzcocks and Slits would play on the same bill."

Coincidentally, The
Mary Chain look set to play on this summer’s Lollapalooza sequel, as a first
step in a long overdue bid to conquer the US. The J&MC have signed to Def
America, the label founded by Rick Rubin, whose previous successes include The
Beastie Boys, Run DMC, and the Black Crowes.

The Jesus and Mary
Chain helped invent the aesthetic that now dominates alternative music: ‘record
collection rock’. Drawing on their enormous and eclectic musical knowledge, groups
such as Primal Scream and Teenage Fanclub weave a sonic quilt of reworked
elements from rock history. Jim Reid reckons rock has always worked like that:
"I don’t think I’ve ever heard a record that I haven’t understood in terms
of its reference points and influences." But while The Rolling Stones,
say, started as obsessive collectors of ancient blues records, they also,
intentionally or not, provided a soundtrack for their times. Rock bands today
tend to reflect only their love of rock history.

Another problem with
The Mary Chain’s rock-for—rock’s sake aesthetic is that their lyrics often
appear to be a mosaic of phrases chosen because they sound cool or are vaguely
sensational (as in "I wanna die like Jesus Christ" on ‘Reverence’),
rather than to communicate anything. The result is music that is spectacular
rather than involving.

"The lyrics are
probably too close to us to explain," says Jim. "And I don’t think
that because you’ve written a song, that gives you the right to tell somebody
what it means. Our songs are pretty abstract and people probably get a loads of
different ideas of what they’re about. And that’s fine by us."

Friday, December 5, 2014

THE RESIDENTS at THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ARTArt Review, 2006by Simon Reynolds

From the start, The Residents saw themselves as a sound and vision entity. Way ahead of punk’s
indie label revolution, the San Francisco group set up not just their own
record company, Ralph, but a do-it-all-yourself
production facility, which included, alongside studios for recording music and
graphic design, a huge sound-stage for making films.

Before they’d even released their debut album, 1973’s Meet the Residents, the band had
embarked on a movie, Vileness Fats,
intended to be the world’s first fourteen-hour musical-comedy-romance set in a
world of one-armed midgets. The project was pursued fitfully for four years
only to be abandoned in 1976. But the warehouse HQ on Grove Street did spew out a stream of
innovative and derangingly strange music videos and short films, and these, along
with footage from the aborted Vileness,
are now being honored with a MOMA retrospective.

Mixed-media performance and audio-visual malarkey were the
norm in San Francisco’s
postpunk scene. Tuxedomoon, an electronic cabaret outfit who recorded for
Ralph,

came out of Sixties underground theater, with one member
having belonged to the

legendary all-gay troupe Angels of Light,, while SF
industrial band Factrix staged mind-bending spectacles in collaboration with local
performance artists like Monte Cazazza and Mark Pauline (the robot-builder and pyrotechnician
behind Survival Research Laboratories). Punk certainly opened things up and
created a new climate in which bands like the Residents and Devo could find an audience.
But in truth the Residents were post-psychedelic rather than post-punk: the
group had been in existence since the late Sixties and had arrived in San Francisco from their
native Louisiana

just as the high tide of acid rock was ebbing. According to
Residents’ spokesman Hardy Fox (the group itself shuns interviews and has
preserved its anonymity for over thirty years), the band “sprang from the fact
that psychedelia dead-ended. The people who were doing experiments in that
direction stopped when they had barely scratched the surface.”Those “people” included the Beatles, Frank
Zappa, and Captain Beefheart. Undeterred by the fact that they could barely
play instruments, The Residents wanted to pick up where their freak heroes had
left off. And, whether onstage or in their videos, they wanted imagery as weird
and wigged-out as their sounds.

The visual work does indeed closely mirror the arc of the
Residents music, (de)evolving from a lo-fi yet genuinely uncanny neo-Dada to a
high-tech but increasingly sterile kookiness. The early “promos”--scare quotes
because when they were made in the late Seventies there were hardly any places
on American TV that showed videos and nobody, except maybe the cable TV fringe,
would dare to show the Residents films--have a macabre whimsy and gorgeous grotesqueness that at
various points brings to mind the Quay Bros, Eraserhead (a late-night movie-house fave with the San Francisco
postpunk set) and the Anglo-surrealist children’s animations made by Postgate
Films (The Clangers, Bagpuss, Pogle’s Wood).InThird Reich’n’Roll (1976) the Residents
cavort in Ku Klux Klan-like head-dresses made from newspaper, pounding
percussion as their mutant cover of Wilson Pickett’s “Land of a Thousand
Dances” plays.

The four One-Minute Movies for the sixty-second tracks
off 1980’s Commercial Album are
visual haikus as exquisitely eerie as the tunes, full of images that linger in
the memory: a female corpse cocooned in cob-webs, a rheumy-eyed geezer watching
TV on a bare mattress who suddenly levitates to the ceiling, a dead pig with
roman candles stuck between its trotters. In several of these micro-movies, The
Residents appear in their famous Fred Astaire meets Un Chien Andalou image: the elegance of top-hats, tails, and canes
disrupted by the gigantic, veiny eyeballs that completely replace their heads. A
fractured tale about a mis-shapen misfit withZelig-like traits of recurrence and ubiquity, Hello Skinny (1980) pays homage to Chris Marker’s La Jetée with its black-and-white stills, the collaging of photographic and drawn material further
recalling Terry Gilliam’s animations for Monty
Python.

The Residents had a parasitical-cum-parodic relationship
with mainstream pop culture, which they regarded as a new form of
totalitarianism, evil because of its banality. Hence the love/hate for the Fab
Four expressed in the cover of their debut album, a defacement of Meet the Beatles’s famous cover; hence Third Reich ‘n’Roll’stransformation ofthe entirety of Sixties pop into the soundtrack for Hitler’s Blitzkrieg.
By the mid-Eighties, the group launched a massive project, the American
Composers Series, 20 albums across 20 years that would honor-through-vandalisation
the work of figures like George Gershwin and Hank Williams.(In the event, the series sputtered to a halt
after just two records). It’s as this point that things start to go awry with
the Residents output, sonically and visually: the irritatingly goofy cover of
James Brown’s “It’s a Man’s World” is out-dulled only by the uninspired
animations that accompany it, while The Residents’ video for their take on John Philip Sousa "Stars and Stripes” is a smug
and clunky exercise in anti-militarism (World War III rendered as an amusement
arcade shooting gallery designed by Lari Pitman and Disney: clown-face bombs,
rabbits riding on top of intercontinental missles, and so forth).

What the
later Residents work, like the flat and strangely static 2000 video for
“Constantinople”, shows is that 98 times out of 100, analog trumps digital.
Computers can create the most superficially “fanstastical” images, but because
you literally can’t believe your eyes, there’s no sense of the unheimlich, none of that “dreamed”
quality possessed by the Residents’ early work, made when the group had to get
by with hand-made props, stage sets, and costumes, with lighting and
camera-work, and above all with their own bodies.